Yann LeCun Calls Anthropic’s Dario Amodei 'Deluded', Fortune Reports
Yann LeCun blames the rogue agents on leaky sandboxes and calls AI doom warnings bad marketing. His Paris company, AMI Labs, is building world models for industry.
LeCun's Views on AI and Its Risks
Yann LeCun does not worry “at all” about AI wiping out humanity, and he has “zero concerns” about the recent run of rogue AI incidents. In an interview with Emily Forlini for Fortune, he called Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei “deluded” and, later, “crazy”.
LeCun attributed the incidents to poor human oversight and system design, including the Hugging Face hack by OpenAI’s agents in July. He believes these incidents were “totally preventable” and that many AI labs lack a basic understanding of cybersecurity.
“Those agents are doing exactly what they’ve been asked to do. They were supposed to be in sandboxes, but the sandboxes were leaky and horribly designed,” LeCun told Fortune.
Effective Altruism and AI Safety
LeCun criticized effective altruism (EA) in AI safety, calling it “super toxic” and “a complete disaster”. He suggested that EA followers inside AI labs suffer from a “paranoia” that leads to poor decisions.
The attention surrounding EA was sparked by a viral post from former Anthropic and OpenAI researcher Jacob Coxon, who wrote that staff at the labs believe AI could kill everyone by the end of the decade.
Regulatory Capture Concerns
LeCun expressed more concern about regulatory capture than extinction. He believes that Amodei, who has attended EA events in the past, is pushing for regulation to protect Anthropic as it nears its IPO. LeCun argued that this would be damaging if Congress acted on it, as it would amount to regulatory capture.
Building AMI Labs
After 12 years at Meta, seven as chief AI scientist, LeCun founded AMI Labs. Based in Paris, with staff in New York, Montreal, and Singapore, AMI builds world models using JEPA, an architecture pioneered by LeCun. JEPA predicts data inside a model’s internal representations, instead of generating pixels or words.